


Reflect and Refract

by viklikesfic (v_angelique)



Series: It's Us Against the World [1]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Childhood, Coming Out, Coming of Age, F/F, Gen, Sibling Abuse, Siblings, Trans Character, Trans Male Character, Transgender, Transphobia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-08
Updated: 2012-04-08
Packaged: 2017-11-03 07:18:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,211
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/378765
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/v_angelique/pseuds/viklikesfic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This can be read as a standalone, but it's backstory to "No Dictionary Sufficient in This Land of Men," and there will be future stories in that verse.  Told from Harry's POV, I wanted to write this to humanize an abusive character somewhat and to round her out.  In "Dictionary," I imagine the line about Clara questioning Harry's orientation came off as improbable or jarring to some readers, and so I wanted to flesh out where that comes from--not from simple data on twins, it turns out, but from the way Harry followed Amanda throughout their early lives and the impact that might have had on Harry's development.  This is also picking up from part of the original kinkmeme prompt, which asked for Harry being disappointed by John's transition because he broke the mirror image.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Reflect and Refract

"Amanda and Harriet Watson," the headmistress pronounced with crisp, posh syllables belied by the long-suffering sigh that followed them. One might think that she was charged with the discipline of every child in the county, rather than a pair of identical twin seven-year old girls. "What've you done this time, then?" she asked, and Harriet bit her lip around the smile that Amanda couldn't hide. If she was going to be in the headmistress's office for something she didn't do, at least it was with Amanda. That went for a lot.

From her first memories, Harry had felt like the luckiest girl on earth for having a twin. From the time their secret language faded, when they learned proper English syllables and began to interact with the rest of the world, Harry's greatest goal was to stay close to Amanda, to keep as much of that twin-magic as she could. 

"I'm still sick of my name," Amanda muttered, a propos of nothing, as they sat side-by-side on the bench outside Headmistress Dunningham's office, their legs swinging more-or-less in unison. Her eyes were fixed on the disciplinary report they'd have to hand their parents when they returned home from school, a single report with both Watson girls' names written on top.

Initially, Harry had wanted to change her name to Ann or Amy, so that their twinly status would be more obvious to those who hadn't seen them side-by-side, but Amanda had admitted, at the age of five, that she didn't like her own name very much, so the idea seemed cruel. 

"What if you were to change it?" Harry asked then, tugging the report out of Amanda's hand and pressing her finger over Amanda's name. "You could be... Henrietta," she suggested. "Or Helena?" She looked up then and caught a surprisingly serious look on Amanda's dirt-smeared face. It was a look she would see many times after that, a look that was too old for Amanda's features and suggested quite clearly that Harry just didn't get it.

"All right then, girls, off you go back to class," the headmistress interrupted before Harry could think anything of it. She followed along behind Amanda, trying to keep up, and tucked the folded pink report in her rucksack.

~*~

As they grew, Harry learned to mimic Amanda's hobbies and interests, lest Amanda pull away into the dream-world she often seemed to half-inhabit. She learned the names of footballers and how to kick a ball around, and she watched, trying not to squirm, as Amanda dissected worms and insects in the park on Saturdays. The harder she tried to be like Amanda, to be tough and gutsy and tomboyish, the more she felt like she was being humoured. She hated that twist of condescension in the way Amanda looked at her sometimes. Amanda taught her how to wrestle, and Harry used it against her when she took on that look, shoved Amanda against a wall and smacked her. It was almost eerie how Amanda never complained.

Their parents humoured the short, shaggy blonde hair they wore as they crept toward puberty, both average-sized and stocky but slowly starting to develop. Amanda drew further in, just as Harry desperately wanted a best friend with whom to share secrets. Sometimes Harry would say bitter, cruel things, things she wasn't sure she meant or not, and Amanda's face would be eerily blank.

"You're not _like_ me," she declared one night in a harsh whisper, after lights out. She was bitchy and had her period, an event that came early for her and not yet for Amanda, widening the chasm between them. "You're not like anyone else, either." Amanda's silence unnerved her and she threw off the covers, marching to Amanda's bed in the darkness with the sanitary pad squishing heavily between her thighs. "Why?" she hissed, bending down so that her face was close to Amanda's, pressing her fingers around Amanda's jaw as she'd seen a leading man do to his wife in a violent and sexual film scene that made all the girls titter and feel mildly uncomfortable. It didn't garner a reaction, and eventually Harry went back to bed, but it was true.

The other girls _didn't_ understand Amanda, and by extension didn't understand either of the twins with their out-of-fashion haircuts and boyish clothes, who went to football matches rather than out shopping. One night Harry raided Amanda's side of the room, trashed it looking for a diary, but Amanda didn't have one. She never told anyone much, even though she had this knack for making you feel like she was, like she was confiding in you. Harry hated that even she, the girl from the same womb, couldn't tell the difference. She hated this talent that Amanda was developing without her.

~*~

 

Amanda never had a nickname. 

A boy tried to call her Mandy once, and she punched him in the mouth. At twelve, a few cruel girls told her that her parents named her that because she's "A man, duh." There was a long silence that twisted like a knife in Harry's stomach, Amanda staring blankly at them, until she proclaimed, calm and sure, that she'd be more likely to _get_ a man than they ever would. Soon, true enough, she had her first boyfriend, and Harry started reading riot grrl magazines.

It seemed that Amanda would be a natural fit for feminism and riot grrl and the lesbian culture Harry was only just discovering. She wore her hair short, still, with baggy striped sweaters that obscured a generous bust that had popped out seemingly overnight, to Harry's relief. True, boobs weren't really a big part of riot grrl or zine culture, but it was nice to have the images match again. 

Amanda still preferred sport to makeup. But as much as Amanda fit the lesbian expectations of style, she never veered into the orientation or the community. At 14, she came home with bloody knuckles and confessed to Harry that she had punched a boy in the face for getting fresh. In a rare moment of honesty, she told Harry about how sexy he was, how good it felt to snog him and feel his hard chest and thigh pressing against her body. But she didn't want to fuck, didn't want anything inside her. Harry could understand that. She was squeamish enough about tampons, and poetry seemed more sexual than intercourse. The more she drank out late with her friends, while Amanda was busy snogging boys, the more sure she was of the transformative power of poetry. The details started to blur then.

~*~

"My name is John," Amanda declared calmly one night at dinner, and it sounded absurd coming from the mouth of a buxom sixteen-year-old, the heterosexual twin, the one their parents didn't have to worry about. Harry pushed her mushy peas around her plate and stared.

"What the fuck?" she blurted out, and their parents didn't even correct her. "That's a terrible name."

That really was the first thing Harry thought, before Amanda elaborated, started to explain in short, clipped sentences that she was a boy, that she had always been a boy. It was so surreal that it took those stretches of sentences for Harry to get past "John is a terrible name for a straight girl," and in fact took several astonished rebukes from their father before she got to what she really wanted to know. 

_Why didn't you tell me first?_

She didn't ask, numb, knowing she had already lost Amanda. As their parents argued with the older twin, Harry robotically moved food to her mouth, processing words but not their meaning. Amanda was a man. Amanda was a gay man. Amanda would be living as a man as soon as she finished her A-levels. It was bloody absurd, all of it. Later she drank vodka till she passed out and no one stopped her. Still later she grasped what had happened, and she began to wrap her head around the fact that all Amanda's reticence, all her humouring and letting Harry follow along without ever disclosing the contents of her head, was just one big dramatic secret. Amanda had let Harry pour her heart out for _years_ , let her build a life around the idea of being more like her twin, being that enviable co-ordinating jumper set pair, and she had never said a word. Still later she shoved and slapped and cried, but her hands felt numb and her tears felt dry. Amanda took it all in silence, and after that they didn't speak for a long time.

Harry was not the first to know. She had never been the bearer of Amanda's secrets, and now that was suddenly clear, and Harry was the fool. A lifetime of chasing, reaching across the gap between them, and Amanda--John--was going to walk away.

~*~

Harry drank to numb the sudden break, the growing chasm between herself and Amanda, but also to find something fun again, to find her own personality. Years of tomboyishness fell aside as Amanda quietly finished school, living as a nobody when she couldn't really be Amanda but wasn't allowed to be John yet either. 

They didn't speak. Their parents barely spoke to Amanda either, didn't seem to know what to say. Harry befriended her mother for the first time, clinging to a womanhood she could no longer share. She learned to apply makeup and walk in high heels, became a high femme lipstick lesbian as soon as those words came into currency. She drank martinis as her mother did her nails and showed up hungover to class, while Amanda quietly sailed through GCSEs. Sometimes Harry wondered if Amanda really, truly, didn't care about them, and if that was true, why the fuck she had let them care so much in return.

"You're a selfish bitch," Harry declared one night when the two of them were home alone and she was too drunk to stay quiet. Amanda responded with that cool, indifferent mask, so Harry threw the bottle at her head just to get a reaction. She dodged it and left the room as Harry watched the wasted liquor drip down the wall, pool on the carpet among shards of glass. More nights passed that way and Harry often forgot what transpired, except for the fact that Amanda didn't seem to know how to fight back, and hardly seemed to want to. Harry resented her for not allowing Harry her anger. She was pissed off at Amanda for leaving her space to be guilty, and when Amanda left, her only words were good riddance.

~*~

With Amanda off to med school, off to hormones and this mysterious world of "transition," Harry let the fog of alcoholism settle around her, partying and fucking her way through a Bachelor's degree as more weight settled on her hips and lines crept around her eyes. In lucid moments, she recognised some thread of abuse in her behaviour towards her sister, but couldn't make herself want to stop it. 

Clara was a healthy breath of fresh air in her life, and with her Harry shed pounds and self-loathing and found a semblance of self, at least for a little while. John still brought out her most vindictive side, on the occasions when she saw him. They were barely recognisable as related now, let alone identical twins, and it pissed her off how good he looked. She couldn't help but goad, couldn't help but remind him that he couldn't hit a girl as she poured her pain out into her behaviour towards him. Not that Amanda had ever hit back, or ever done anything really, other than tuck Harry in and hold her hair back when she had to puke. She refused to be grateful for that. Amanda owed her that much.

Clara asked, once, if Harry thought she would've been straight without John, if she would've been an average girl with an average husband. A cold bolt of rage settled in Harry's stomach with the question. _How dare could she of done that? How dare Amanda take this from me?_ And a thread of guilt pushed in alongside it, _why didn't I take the lead, back when I still good? Why didn't I let Amanda follow me to heteronormativity and feminine grace and happily-ever-afters?_ She was such a mess.

When she saw John in a mixed gay bar in London, she stopped short of decking him in the face, but she sneered and refused to acknowledge what was happening, the darling of the crowd-- _her brother._ His facial hair and muscled flat chest were still incredibly jarring to her, that not-me that showed her what she might have become. 

"You can't hit a girl," she reminded him later, making sure he felt the sting of her palm against his cheek through the slur of alcohol. She threw words at him, because words were her only remaining weapons.

~*~

Now he is a stranger, a veteran, a lover to someone she will never really know. They are not best friends; they are barely even siblings. She can be mistaken for a brother, in his flatmate's deductions, because who she is could never really be read through John. It was never a well-formed mirror.


End file.
